Many decades ago, Richardson found that deadly encounters have power-law size distributions. The details of these distributions, however, are sensitive to the specifics of the conflict. In this project, in collaboration with Annette Idler (Oxford), Katerina Tkacova (Oxford) and Neil Johnson (George Washington), we study how features such as the imbalance between opposing conflict actors affect the details of the size distribution of deadly encounters. This work fits into a larger project within which we study the way in which conflict actors take advantage of ungoverned locations throughout the world in order to function and connect with each other. One major goal of this work is to find ways to disrupt their operations.
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